December 3, 2016

Finally, Trump Explained

Do
you remember “50 First Dates”? It was a Drew Barrymore movie about a
woman with short-term amnesia who wakes up every morning with no memory
whatsoever of the day that went before.

I am thinking it’s the perfect Donald Trump analogy.

In
the past, I’ve always presumed that when Trump completely changed his
position on health care or the Mexican wall or nuclear weapons in Japan,
it was due to craven political opportunism. But it’s much more calming
to work under the assumption that he doesn’t remember anything that
happened before this morning.

Think
about it next time you hear him bragging about his big margin of
victory. “We won in a landslide. That was a landslide,” he told a crowd
in Ohio on Thursday. It was perhaps the first time in history that a
candidate used those terms after receiving 2.5 million votes fewer than
his competitor.

It’s stupendously irritating, unless you work under the assumption that he no longer recalls the real story.

This
week, Trump was on a victory lap in Indiana, where United Technologies
just agreed to keep about 1,000 jobs at a Carrier gas-furnace factory
that had been slated to be moved to Mexico. Trump had repeatedly vowed
to save the Carrier jobs during the campaign, and even though there is
no reason to believe this will have any effect whatsoever on other jobs
in other factories, it seemed like a nice symbolic win.

But
during his remarks to his ebullient fans, Trump cheerfully explained
that he had no memory whatsoever of having promised to protect the
Carrier workers. Until he heard it on TV.

Trump
told the folks in Indiana that he had been watching the news one night
last week and saw a feature in which a Carrier worker said he was not
worried about the company’s plans to move his job to Mexico because
Donald Trump had promised to save it.

“I said, ‘I wonder if he’s being sarcastic, because this ship has sailed.’”

But
no, Trump said that he then watched a clip of Donald Trump the
candidate, “and he made the statement that Carrier’s not going anywhere,
they’re not leaving.”

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He
is just like Leonard, the hero of the movie “Memento,” who had to
tattoo the clues to a murder on his arm because he couldn’t remember
anything. Although Leonard made way more effort.

I
am not the only person trying to come up with an overarching
explanation for Trump’s failure to keep a constant position, but I think
I’ve got the most flattering theory.

Former
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told a postelection panel this week
that the media’s negative response to his candidate’s constantly
switching stories was due to an insistence on taking him “so literally.”

American
voters, Lewandowski continued, understood “that sometimes, when you
have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or
at a bar, you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all
the facts to back it up.”

Some
of you may find it disturbing that one of Trump’s chief apologists was
basically saying that he talks policy like a drunk at happy hour. Some
of you may hear Trump constantly contradicting today what he said
yesterday and decide he’s an idiot.

From now on I’m going to try to
think of him as a little bit like my dog, Frieda. Frieda is extremely
intelligent, but her memory is only good for about 90 seconds.